In the latest in our series about life-changing summers, novelist Megan Nicol Reed recalls the anxious, confusing days when she realised she was in the throes of perimenopause.
Write, she said, about the summer that changed you. Anything, she said, but losing your virginity. Apparently, she already had that covered.
Naturally, then I could think of nothing else. Of that small, up-high hostel room. How that nasty sheet didn’t quite reach around the single mattress, how black his skin shone against its cheapness, its whiteness.
Summer is most definitely the season to do it for the first time. For more than winter, more than autumn, more even than spring – the season of new shoots, fresh beginnings – summer belongs to the young. Not young children, mind, and absolutely not the self-described "young at heart" (bleurgh!), but youth. That terrible and exquisite age band which feels like it might just go on and on, deliciously, horrifically, forever, but is really so brief, so fleeting.
As summer crept up on us this year, teasing, retreating, I watched my teenage daughter and her friends cavorting in the pool, their smooth, lithesome bodies beach-ready without even trying, and my thoughts turned, not to summers long past when I was equally youthful although surely nowhere near as beautiful, but to the summer of 2018/19. The summer something in me, something once, too, fruitful and lush, came to an end, a stop. The summer I changed.
Of course, it didn’t happen overnight, had, in fact, been building for a while. If you were to ask me to put a date on it, I would hazard a guess that it had begun five years earlier, just before my 40th birthday. At least that’s when I first became conscious of it. Initially I thought it was a kind of madness: a relentless cycle in which I lurched between an over-inflated sense of my own attractiveness, up for anything, full of the joys of everything, and a mood defined by misery and despair, a truly deep loathing of every single thing about myself.
I had always been, as my family fondly called it, a "worrywart", so when I began to wake in the morning, heart pounding, fists clenched, when anxiety began to shadow me like an unwanted ex-lover, I assumed it was just my fretful personality. And my periods had always been ruinous, so when they became worse, more erratic, more unwieldy, I assumed it was just my stupid hormones.
For someone who had always taken pride in being fiercely self-aware, the penny took an embarrassingly long time to drop.
Anyway, there I was, one summery afternoon, a few days before Christmas 2018, in the garden bar of the local to celebrate a friend’s birthday. The host was a renowned party boy and when someone presented him with a pair of salt and pepper shakers, one marked "cocaine", the other "speed", much hilarity ensued. I can remember fixating on our gift, a boxed Australian shiraz, and thinking that it felt heavy and wrong, and berating myself for this.
As everyone around me made merry in the sun, I tried to explain to a friend how I had been feeling, how my chest felt like it was laced into a corset, and my mouth was tight with the weight of it all. What on earth have you got to be anxious about, she exclaimed. When I said that I thought I might be in the throes of perimenopause, she hooted. Darling, you’re much too young!
I felt like a freak, an interloper, like I could not cope, let alone have fun. So, I took myself off. When I got home, I discovered the plywood half-pipe my husband had organised as an early Christmas present for our son had arrived, and he had set it up in front of our house and invited over a bunch of friends. The noise they were making as they dropped in on their skateboards was obnoxiously loud and I began to worry about the neighbours and how they might feel about it, and the more I thought about this the more distressed I became. Until I ran outside: howling, grabbing at my hair, begging them to stop, five adolescent boys looking at me like the madwoman I patently was.
The next day, in the Manchester department of Farmers, St Lukes Mall, I got my period. I had not had one in months and months. Had thought maybe they were over. So, when it came, in a sudden gush – whilst I was contemplating how odd it is we herald our Antipodean Christmas humidity with pine trees and fake snow – I was a mess of disappointment and relief. At least, I thought, it explained the previous day’s breakdown.
Although it would be a year before I knew for sure, it was to be my last ever period. And while I should like to say that, that was that, two more summers, several panic attacks, and a string of visits to quacks, would come to pass before I would finally get my menopausal-anxiety under control. It took the intervention of a wise friend, a very good doctor and some serious medication.
This is my final summer prior to entering my 50s and though I have zero libido, am bone-weary, and everyday my skin shows new signs of all the years of sun damage, mostly I know a sense of happiness and peace which eluded me for the better part of my 40s. And for that, I am profoundly thankful.
Megan Nicol Reed is the author of One of Those Mothers (Allen & Unwin NZ).
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